What computer do you have?

[Aractus]

Nice moving the goalposts there. You asked if you could "replace the most common bits that wear out". I linked to a tutorial from ifixit.com, which as you are probably aware, is a highly recommended site for making repairs to various pieces of tech. So, regardless of what the sticker says (it's a sticker, not a ribbon cable, that has that message on it), you can remove the battery and replace it.

As to where you buy a new battery from, have you ever heard of Amazon?

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?...ok+battery

"This item does not ship to Canberra, Australia."

Lithium Ion batteries cannot be carried by air, so how long do you think it would take to arrive in Australia IF I could buy one?

And before you ask, no you cannot get them on Amazon Australia, and the ones sold on eBay are almost certainly fakes (recycled old batteries - heck that's probably what's on Amazon too). For example notice that this one does not carry the C-Tick. Which means that they need to be an approved importanter and have had the item tested and have a certificate issued for it  - which they don't have either (more info on all that here). It's actually not at all difficult or expensive to have a cert issued for an electronics product you are importing, so the fact that the products on eBay do not carry them shows they have been illegally imported, have not been tested or approved for use in Australia, and therefore are almost certainly fakes (reused batteries).

The mechanism that allows the battery to be easily removed, and also holds the battery in place, is bulkier than a battery which is built into the laptop. That should just be obvious.

You say that laptops do not need to be as thin as tablets, and that's your opinion. Apple isn't selling its products to you, it's selling them to a wider audience. People seem to like thinner laptops. That has been a trend across all personal laptops for years.

Weight, not thickness, is the more important aspect here.

This is veering into a debate about which laptops are better / have more features. I'm not interested in debating that because ultimately people decide based on personal preferences. I'm only interested in correcting misinformation.

It's not a "feature" Tiberius, it's the durability design of the product. And since it's a standard design now for laptops in that price range, people could reasonably expect their Macbooks to be spill resistant if Apple does not make it clear that there is a critical design flaw in their products at the time of sale. Again, I'm talking Australian consumer law - I know that in the USA there is not as much protection for consumers, but what I'm saying is that this feature is so standard now in laptops of that price range that I strongly believe that Apple would lose a court case held against them - just as they did for refusing to honour statutory warranties. Because it is reasonable for a consumer who has owned a Lenovo, Dell, HP, Toshiba, or ASUS in the absence of clear information otherwise to assume that a new Macbook would also be spill resistant.

What I'm talking about is hardware design. I agree 100% with Louis Rossmann when he says "software is opinion, but hardware is not opinion. It's a fact that many of these things are manufactured like shit" That quote is right at the start of the video I posted here, and I could not have put it better myself.

So sue them, or have the Australian government sue them. This has nothing to do with their laptops being user-serviceable.

I takes the ACCC something like 2-3 years to act on these matters, because of how long it takes them to build a case. The right thing to do is for the company to obey the law in the first place, or for consumers not to purchase things from Apple. Especially not laptops. Spilling something on your keyboard should not render an expensive laptop unusable.

I disagree, and unless you have actual evidence to back that statement up, you are just making stuff up.

Again, watch the video I posted. The hinges in Macbooks from that time (and I imagine this applies to 2009 ones too) were deliberately designed to crack. There's nothing you can do to stop it, and this obvious "design flaw", or from Apples POV obsolescence planning, was carried on year after year.  That's simply a fact, it can't be argued since they took a good design that works for every other laptop on the market, and worked for Apple, and delicately chose to redesign how the hinge attaches to the screen so that the frame holding it is weakened by the screw hole, gets hairline fractures, and eventually snaps. Like I said - not opinion, that's fact.

Why hasn't my 8 year old laptop failed yet, if it's designed to fail? Hmm? Literally every other laptop I've had has failed in some way after 1 or 2 years of general use. I carried my MacBook to lectures and back for 3 years, it's been shipped around the world, I've probably dropped it a few times by accident. Still works. Yes, I know this is all anecdotal, but at least it's better than just pulling "facts" out my ass and pretending that Apple purposefully sells shitty laptops.

It doesn't need to completely fail to be rendered unfit for purpose. For all I know, you didn't cycle the battery enough to drain it to the point where it needs replacement. For all I know you're not prone to spilling shit either.

Yet as you admitted, they sell a service to replace the batteries, so it's not like non-technical people are left with no option. If you don't like that, don't buy a MacBook. If you're OK with taking the back of the laptop off (which is designed to come off, by the way) and replacing the battery yourself, you're fine.

Again I'm calling BS on this. 1. no non-technical person ever has a problem swapping out an external battery. 2. It takes 5 minutes work to open a Macbook and change the battery, that's not worth charging people $100+ above the retail cost of the battery for, if anything the service should be performed for free - or cost no more than $10 above the retail cost of the battery.